The marketplace platform structure hosts profiles of everything from architecture and designer to construction management to deep sustainability retrofit contractors - akin to, but more robust than the 42 Floors Showroom and something like a commercial version of Zillow's Digs. All inspire owners with high-quality photographs and easier access to professionals who can help make projects come to life. For anyone who has tried to source and vet solution providers for a project large or small - the growth of these kinds of platforms is welcome resource, and an indication of how tech can facilitate faster and better transactions in traditionally off-line industries.

Over the past five months, $25 million in building contracts were originated through the Honest Buildings platform, with Cushman & Wakefield and others industry giants as clients. Honest Buildings has grown to 12 full-time employees in New York, Seattle, and London. Congratulations to the team!

Next Wednesday, May 15th, Seattle City Councilmember Mike O'Brien and Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council, will cut the ribbon on the SEEDclassroom prototype at the South Lake Union Discovery Center.

SEEDclassroom is the first modular building designed to the highest standard of green building: The Living Building Challenge. The 900 square-foot building will be net-zero energy and net-zero water. The structure recycles rainwater, is completely non-toxic, flooded with daylight, and is built to last decades - a far cry from the standard "portable" classroom quality.

The classroom is the first production of the SEED Collaborative, founded by dear friends Ric Cochrane, Stacy Smedley and James Jenkins, and local precision manufacturer, Method Homes. SEED Collaborative will offer a curriculum package, enabling students to learn about and from the building, as well as a platform for ongoing inspiration - including talks by leaders in sustainable design and an online community to connect with other SEEDclassrooms all over the world.

There are also a host of applications for developing nations and schools in low-infrastructure or post-conflict zones, and the SEED Collaborative won't stop there.

I couldn't be more proud of this team - Together they've built a product in total alignment with their values, one that has the potential to shift a generation's expectations for what buildings can and should be. Keep up the incredible momentum, guys, you're onto something big.

Link to today's coverage in the Daily Journal of Commercehere. Full text of Method's press release and detail on the building design below:

The Bertschi School Living Building: SEED Collective's first effort and inspiration for the modular classroom design

Method Prefab and SEED Collaborative announce they will unveil a self-sustaining modular classroom prototype designed and built to pursue the Living Building Challenge. The prototype – called SEEDclassroom – will launch at the International Living Future Institute’s Living Future unConference, a convention focused on major global issues and innovative solutions in the green building movement. This year’s unConference takes place in downtown Seattle May 15–17. The SEEDclassroom prototype will be on display from May 15–June 18 at Vulcan Real Estate’s South Lake Union Discovery Center.

Honest Buildings, a building information network, has launched in New York, DC and San Francisco now Seattle, bringing data on over 32,000 new buildings into the public domain.

The platform is a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn for buildings and the people that build, manage, occupy and own them - an entirely new level of access and transparency for real estate. Building 'profiles' can include basic building information: address, photos, square footage, ownership and management details, as well building certifications, regulatory compliance, project specifications and vendor contacts -bringing together information that has historically been extremely difficult to compile, let alone interact with.

What’s exciting about this is that transparency breeds comparison and competition, and over time, competition almost always advances the standards of performance in any industry. As Elizabeth Heider of Skanska is fond of saying (in reference to an internal competition to green office locations, which led to higher ajnd higher levels of LEED certification), “testosterone will save the world”.

While there is always some role for regulation in achieving industry change, it is notoriously hard to figure out how best to regulate an evolving market. Transparency and the resulting competition work faster, cheaper, and don’t carry the pain-in-butt burden of compliance.

Bentham's Panopticon, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791

Behavior in the Fishbowl Philosopher Jeremy Bentham nailed the behavior-changing power of transparency in his eighteenth century concept of the panopticon - the ‘ideal’ jail building – a circular structure where prisoners, knowing that their behavior could be observed at any time, would self-regulate. But the disciplinary tone applied by both Bentham and, later, Foucault misses out on opportunities.

Information Frees Markets In another context, clear disclosure enables growth: Microfinance as an industry has suffered in recent years due to concerns about opaque and unfairly high prices on financial products for low-income consumers. Rather than mandate and enforce against “usury” rates, governments have partnered with MF Transparency (an NGO bred by the leaders of prior World Bank initiatives and promoted by Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Muhammad Yunus), and major banks to translate pricing into a single standard definition “annual percentage rate” or APR - which can be reported with any other materials the bank offers. MF Transparency works collaboratively with each bank, leading up to an established date in each country, when all participating banks will voluntarily disclose their products’ APR. At this point, since everyone from senior management to line staff knows how to calculate APR, no regulation is required – the customers compare and decide. And for those banks opting not to participate? Well, would you buy a car with no safety rating, or eat at a New York restaurant missing one of Bloomberg’s famous letter grades? The resulting clarity has eased minds and pocketbooks of customers and investors.

Back to buildings- for any of this kind of traction to take hold in a real estate context - accurate information needs to be available, and decision-makers need to begin using it consistently. The current information available on Honest Buildings varies widely between buildings, because users can post as much or as little as they want. However, with well over 400,000 buildings registered less than three months after the firm’s public launch - Honest Buildings is off to a promising start.

As earlier articles have suggested, information and reviews from Honest Buildings may soon become as core to real estate due diligence as Facebook is to dates and Yelp to meals, prompting building owners and operators to do even better than today’s ‘best’ - real estate, after all, tends to cost a lot more than dinner.

How do you change behavior? The usual tools: some combination of carrot, stick, and heavy regulation.

Another theme consistent throughout the first two days of the Urban Land Institute Spring Meeting, an annual conference focused on energy efficiency in real estate and urban design: Competition.

Turning serious goals into bouts of healthy one-upmanship is, by now, a conventional approach - the great news is that there are more and better tools available now than around this time last year. One exciting launch covered in both the Climate Change, Land Use and Energy Advisory Board meeting and in Carol Browner’s opening keynote: thesocial energy app. A joint effort with Facebook, Opower and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the app enables Facebook users to compare their energy consumption with that of their peers. The launch is four weeks in. With participation from 16 utilities reaching up to 20 million households - even in the sea of pre-IPO chatter, this is big news for real estate.

Efficiency in buildings is all about operational performance - but it's awfully difficult to be the best, or to promise that a building designed to the highest standards is delivering, without a way to quantify what's going on inside. Past industry efforts to collect and share data have struggled to be relevant, burdened in part by cumbersome and asymmetrical inputs, heavy fees, infrequent updates, and the participants’ ability to remain anonymous or batched with other peer groups. To overcome these obstacles, like the rapidly growing Honest Buildings platform, the Facebook application will be free, simple, visible immediately and linked to as much other information as the user elects to share.As with any long-term goal tough enough to matter, consistent effort will be critical.